The Future for Curious People: A Novel (7 page)

“I think envisioning must make you hungry,” Madge says, cutting into a rib eye. “Dr. Plotnik explained how the whole thing works, the physics behind it all, how we’re the source of manufacturing the images, as if our very own cells know all of this information. It’s fascinating, right?”

I nod my head. The waitresses at this place all wear nylons and orthopedic-looking lace-up shoes; the shoes remind me of Madge’s future ultrasuedes, which are exactly like her current ultrasuedes. And maybe that’s the worst part about envisioning, I think. How things don’t change as much as you think they should. I feel sorry for the waitresses each time they go shooshing by.

“Plotnik really took his time,” she says. “He’s a genius.” I’m relieved to be here with the real Madge. I tell myself,
Here she is.
In the flesh. At this moment, she’s explaining all the things that Plotnik told her but with her beautiful hands moving through air and her face lit up. This is the Madge who stopped me earlier this winter to catch snowflakes on our tongues, who tracked down a slightly used and now vintage action figure I was obsessed with as a child. This is the Madge I love and this is the Madge who’s actually important.

“What did your place smell like?” I say.

Madge looks up, flabbergasted. She often gets flabbergasted in her conversations with me but not usually so quickly.

“What?” I say.

“You’re not going to fixate, are you? I hate it when you do that.”

“Mine smelled like egg rolls. That’s all. I mean, yours could have smelled like borscht. I’m not fixating.”

She shakes her head and picks up her knife and fork reluctantly, like she’s rethinking the rib eye. “You’ve just been through a life-altering experience. Could you please act like it?”

“I’m not sure what that’s supposed to look like.” I pick at my mashed potatoes. I’m not hungry.

Madge rolls her eyes. There’s some chewing.

“So,” I say, “what did you think of it?”

“What? The smell?”

“No,” I say. “What you saw.”

“I don’t know if it matters.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean . . .” She wipes her mouth, smearing her lipstick just enough to make her look like she’s been freshly kissed. When was the last time I smeared her lipstick with a good old-fashioned kiss? I love kissing Madge. “I mean that it’s the whole experience that counts. We can
know
things. It’s a new way of life!”

“I know and love you now.”

She blushes. I can still sometimes make Madge blush like when we were first dating. “I love you now, too,” she says. “That’s unquestionable.”

“What if it’s all just a racket?” I say. “They have whole packages, five-for-threes, that kind of thing. It’s not very medical.”

“Don’t be jaded.”

I think that’s a yes. “I’m not jaded,” I tell her.

“Yes, you are.”

“C’mon,” I say. “What did you see?”

“I ran into Elizabeth, for one. She was beautiful!”

“Elizabeth?”

“My sister’s daughter. She’d dropped something off at the house and she waved me down as I was coming home.”

“Lib,” I whisper, too low for Madge to hear. “Short for Libby. Short for Elizabeth.” The girl on the bike was the fat toddler whom we visited just a month ago—a two-year-old. She spent most of the visit throwing things off her high-chair tray. “But she’s practically an infant,” I say, letting my fork sink into the mashed potatoes and stop eating altogether.

“Well, she is going to grow up!”

“I know, I know.”

Madge salts her potatoes. “What did you see?”

“I only saw your ankles. They looked good, but . . .” I keep going because I don’t want to know if Madge’s envisioning led her to believe I was about to jerk off. “Somewhere along the line, I start gelling my hair. Can we nip that in the bud?”

“That’s the thing,” Madge says. “We can. Of course we can. We can affect the future. We have two more tries left.”

I’m not sure what to think. Maybe her view of things is a little brighter. Maybe I caught myself a little too vulnerable. My mother had recently died. I wasn’t myself. “Do I have to set up my old bachelor pad in our basement?”

“Do you
really
believe that Bart and Amy are going to be yachting and playing tennis?” She leans forward. “I think they were lying.”

“I think I might have a better job in the future,” I say hopefully. “I had on very mature, upper-management pants.”

Madge reaches over and touches my sleeve. “I’m sorry about your mother.”

I think I nod.

“Elizabeth told me you looked really upset about it.”

“Maybe I can talk to her about her health,” I say. “Screenings and vitamins.”

“Well,” Madge says, lifting her wineglass. “Two more tries! Plotnik says that some couples have had a good bit of success in two more tries!”

I lift my mug of beer, wishing it were a keg. “Two more tries! We aren’t sunk yet!”

We clink our glasses, sip and set them down.

“How do we affect the future?” I ask. “I mean, how do we make it less, less, you know . . .”

Madge is cutting her meat into little pieces as if she’s preparing the plate for a child. She shakes her head. “I’ll ask Plotnik,” she says, fitting the last three pieces of beef onto her fork. “I trust him.” She puts the fork in her mouth and glances at me. She’s chewing but smiling and chewing. Her cheeks, like little shiny bulbs, bob. Her eyes are moist. With fear? With hope?

The waitress shooshes by. I lift a hand to get her attention, which she ignores, and I reach for my wallet with the other. It’s not there.

I toss my napkin on my plate. “Shit. Did I lose my wallet again?”

“What?”

“I must have left it at Chin’s.”

“Do you just hate to pay for things? Are you
that
cheap?”

“I’m not cheap on purpose!”

“Are you
subconsciously
cheap? Jesus, I think you’re subconsciously cheap! This is becoming a real problem.” Madge sits back, full of herself. “Oh, I know what it is.”

“What?”

“It’s an identity issue,” Madge says.

“What does that mean?” I don’t like her tone.

“You keep losing your identification. You keep losing yourself. Purposefully.”

“Not
purposefully,
” I tell her.

“Well, it seems like it’s on purpose to me. There are no accidents.”

“There are accidents all the time!” I look down at my plate. My fork has been completely submerged in mashed potatoes. “
No accidents.
I hate that saying.” Am I having an identity issue?

“It isn’t a saying,” Madge says, putting her credit card down on the table and hailing the waitresses. “It’s psychology, Godfrey. It’s part of our brains. It’s science.” And she smiles at me with her head tilted. I’m not going to lie, Madge is pretty, even when she’s being condescending.

“Since when is psychology a science?” I say under my breath.

“What was that?” Madge asks.

But I’m just nodding my head.

Dot and I walk into the library’s open airy entranceway, the expanse of skylights overhead, the massive portraits of austere human beings gazing down on us in our puffy coats.

“It feels like a museum,” Dot says. She has a broad face, almost moonish, with great short choppy bangs and big eyes that make her look almost Manga.

“It’s more like a zoo that lends out animals. The books are living, breathing, heart-beating creatures.”

“So a lot of lives are at stake?”

“Actually, yes. We are the protectors of dangerous materials.” I want to tell her that if not for me, a lot of the children of Baltimore would be doing meth in dark basements, but that’s not completely verified.

“I see.”

She doesn’t see. I can tell.

As we peel off all our winter wear, we run into Chuck, our overly large-headed deputy. I introduce him to Dot who seems a little wary. She has anxiety around cops. Chuck says, “New pics!” and he waves his smartphone. “Chuck E. Cheese!”

Chuck has the cutest offspring in the world—fat and sassy. His wife dresses them in matching handmade costumes to coincide with current events and pop stars—the royal wedding, Lady Gaga, and an occasional uninspired bear suit. These kids, though, the dimples and snotty noses, the milk mustaches.

Chuck guides us through the latest series, and honestly, by the end, I’m a little choked up. That is how relentless the cuteness is. He’s invited me over a few times and I bring the kids Slinkys and Silly Putty, and I feel like, if I play it right, they might soon be calling me Auntie Evelyn, which I would love more than a normal person would. Families, I can’t stop myself from building them out of thin air.

“How are you doing these days?” he asks me.

“Still no cat!” I’ve promised him to one day adopt a stray cat and compete in the themed-costume department.

“When you do, it’s game on,” Chuck says.

“Game on!”

As I lead Dot behind the check-out desk, she says, “Is he always here? And armed?”

“Pretty much. Sometimes there’s stand-in Chuck, but he’s a little bland. Like real Chuck but just lesser, you know?”

Dot nods. “It’s a library. People take the books. It’s okay to take the books.” She’s really just talking to herself. She’s jangled and I am, too—Chin’s warning echoes in my head. Am I even still a feminist? Shit. I don’t think
anyone
knows what that means anymore.

Ruby is checking out books.

“I’m going to see Mr. Gupta.”

Ruby says, “All right.”

“Ruby, Dot. Dot, Ruby. You two converse. I’ll be back in a minute.”

I’m actually here so I can beg Mr. Gupta to give Dot a job checking out books at the circulation desk. She was fired from a Barnes and Noble a couple months ago for not-so-accidentally taking things that weren’t hers. But as I explain the situation to Gupta in his cramped office, I don’t mention the stealing and instead use the term
let go.

But Gupta, who’s eating a grilled cheese sandwich over a brown paper bag on his desk, doesn’t let that glide by. “And what was she
let go
for?”

“She tended to borrow things,” I told him. “Books, mostly. And of course, only the really good ones.”

“So, stealing. This is what you mean?”

I switch gears. “But here’s the thing. This is a library.” I press my fingertips together and bounce my hands a little. “And the beauty of libraries is that you’re
supposed
to borrow from them. She always gives things back. She’s a natural borrower. It’s like hardwired.”

Mr. Gupta considers this. “I remember the old days, Evelyn, when libraries were holy. When I first got my graduate degree and before the Internet, we were the gatekeepers of knowledge. We stood up against censorship, and now we pack the shelves with
Fifty Shades of Grey
because the people want their light porn. We were anticommercialism once—as un-American as any institution was allowed to be—and now we call the patrons ‘customers’ and we walk around asking if we can help them
find
something.” He’s got a good head of steam going. “We used to be democratic, buying all those lonesome titles, and now we’re up to our necks in best sellers. So why not hire bookstore staff ? Now that the brick-and-mortar bookstores are crumbling, we
are
bookstores, Evelyn Shriner! We
are
bookstores!”

I’ve heard this speech in snippets, but Gupta has really stitched it all together in dramatic fashion. I pause to let the speech air out a little, have its moment, and then I say, “Is that a yes?”

“She’s a thief. Chuck will not like that.”

“Really, Mr. Gupta, she’s a borrower and you could go so far as to say that this building wouldn’t exist without the Dots of the world.”

Gupta perks up. “Her name is Dot?”

“Yes.”

“Like the astronaut ice cream?”

I nod. I hadn’t thought of that before. “Yes, just like the ice cream the astronauts ate.”

“I used to enjoy getting a cup of it at the mall.” He pats his midsection nostalgically.

“Who didn’t!”

“I’ll have to see her résumé and interview her and all of that. Can she work mornings?”

“Absolutely.”

“We need someone for mornings. I’ve had to rearrange the whole schedule since Rita followed that boy to Africa.”

“I think they joined the Peace Corps.”

Gupta isn’t paying attention. He glazes over, like Rita’s leaving has caused an atmospheric shift and now a meteor the size of Texas is headed straight for us. “Mornings!”

“Dot loves mornings. She wakes up for mornings.”

“And you can promise me she will always only
legally
borrow from us?”

“It’s a given,” I say, knowing that this might not be entirely true. “She’s here. You could interview her now. She brought her résumé!”

He takes another bite and waves his hand, meaning
Sure, sure, bring her in.

I send in Dot and tell her I’m going to wait outside by the bike racks around the corner on Mulberry. I usually love the library because of its echoing hushes, its gluey, dusty smell, its preservationist quality—everything loved, everything in its place—but today I feel like being in the open air, as if open air will clear my mind. And what is my mind cluttered with? Well, Chin’s warning. How long should I wait before I go back? And when I do get unflagged, who will I next envision my life with?

I think about Jason Binter and I’m mad I wasted a precious session on him—not knowing how precious the sessions are.

I think of Godfrey Burkes, too, sitting there in his paper gown, pressing his knees together. I wonder who he was there to envision a future with. And I think of Adrian, because it’s impossible not to. Adrian. Where is he now? Is he even thinking about me? When’s he coming to pick up his little box of left-behind shite?

Eventually Dot appears, her coat stuffed, and I hope to God she hasn’t already stolen stuff. She looks fifteen pounds heavier, but maybe she’s just three thousand pages richer?

Before I can ask, she says, “This legally stealing shit could become a drag. I have to wait in line with all the regular people.”

“Oh, to be the Normals,” I say.

“I got the job—on a trial basis. Thank you,” she says. “And you know how hard it is for me to say that.”

“It didn’t even sound sarcastic!” I want to reach out and hug her, but I know better. Dot isn’t huggy.

“I’m trying to work on my sarcastic problem,” she says. “You should be able to compliment someone on their outfit without them calling you a prick.”

“Who was it?”

“My sister-in-law. I was being serious. It was a
nice
outfit,” Dot says, and then she adds, “Did that sound sarcastic?” She sets the books down, shoves them in her backpack.

“It sounds like your sister-in-law was wearing a rainbow unitard or something.”

“Shit. Well, I mean it—thank you.”

“You’re welcome,” I say.

We unlock our bikes. Dot gets on the bike slowly, wobbly under the weighty books, and we begin to pedal the few blocks to our favorite diner, Café Honeybun, where the waitresses call the patrons “hon,” Baltimore’s most beloved pet name. They know Dot there, which means they’re not upset when she steals stuff. They know she’s going to bring it back. It’s hard to find places that are cool with thievery as a nervous tic.

At a red light, Dot says, “When are we going to get a car? It’s winter for shit’s sake.” Dot would like to see us driving an eco car one day, like a Leaf or something. “Electricity is easier to steal than gasoline. Plus, you know, the world and everything.”

“Dotty Dotty Dot Dot,” I say. “I don’t
want
a car!”

A car would be nice, but even in the cold with these gusts, stuck in the sincerity of this silly Baltimore weather, I am happy on my bike. I wasn’t allowed to ride them as a kid because my older sister died on one. Of course no one can blame my parents for not liking bikes, especially children’s bikes. I have a picture of my sister, Meg, on her twelfth birthday when she got her vintage banana seat. She died not three blocks from the house. A drunk driver midafternoon.

I’m not trying to upset my parents by riding a bike instead of driving, though, to be sure, bike lanes are rare, and riding can get scary sometimes; I’m just trying to make up for a lost childhood. If they want to take that personally, there’s little I can do about it. Dot thinks I’m an only child. Not a lie. I was born an only child.

We stop at another red light. I touch the curb with one boot. This is the spot where Adrian and I broke up. I pretend I’m a tour guide of my own life. “And here, when Evelyn was approximately twenty-five years of age, she broke up with her boyfriend, Adrian Kleivling, lead guitarist and sometimes background singer for the not-ever-famous band, the Babymakers.”

“Right here?” Dot says. “This just feels really public.” Dot’s a private person.

“It was a now-or-never moment.” A fork within a fork. “It felt right, right then. Or as right as any of those moments can ever feel.”

“Adrian was sweet but kind of dense,” Dot says as if he’s dead.

“He’s still sweet and dense, Dot. He didn’t blow up when I broke up with him.”

“I’m just saying.”

We ride the final block to Café Honeybun, lock up our bikes, head inside, and take a table in the back. Dot’s cheeks are bright red as if she’s been slapped. Mine are, too, I guess.

Our favorite waitress, Delores, hands us some menus. She’s very maternal and calls us both hon without any irony at all. She has these doelike eyes, now sagging a bit with age and little pouches on either side of her cheeks that remind me of Frances McDormand who I hope never gets that surgically fixed. Delores loves to give unbidden romantic advice.

Today she tells us that we need to use the Internet to meet nice guys. “It’s how I met up with Joey,” she advises us without our asking for advice. “The nice ones are all on the websites these days. They’re shy, you know?”

I imagine a site just of the door openers, the check reachers. “I’ll look into it,” I tell Delores, though I’m kind of working on my own plan here.

Dot says, “You can also cherry-pick.” She’s a thief at heart.

“Steal someone else’s husband and someone will give you a world of hurt. An entire
world
of hurt! Especially
me,
” Delores warns, as if Dot were imagining her Joey, at this very moment, walking out of rough surf in slow motion. “I love that man. You know”—Delores leans down now—“you once told me a quote from the unibrow artist.”

“Frida Kahlo?” Dot says.

“That one,” Delores says. “How’d it go?”

“ ‘There have been two great accidents in my life,” I say. “One was the trolley, and the other was Diego. Diego was by far the worst.’ ”

“Joey’s my Diego,” Delores says. “We all have to have one, right?”

Adrian is not my Diego. I haven’t had a Diego and neither has Dot, to my knowledge, but I say, “That’s right.” And Dot holds up her hands in surrender.

We order a mix of sides as if we really want the diner to be a tapas place. And I do.

I ask Dot, “Are you a feminist?”

“Of course. Fipps and I are both feminists.” Fipps is Dot’s bichon frise. “I wanted a girl dog because we’d be united.” She raises her fist.

“What does it mean to be a feminist?”

“Equal pay for equal work, bitch.”

“Does it mean we aren’t supposed to put love first? I mean, aren’t we supposed to know better or something?”

“Wasn’t there a memo about how we’re supposed to have it all? But women who are like now in their fifties must have rolled that back, right? I mean, we can’t have it all, not easily at least. That’s what I’ve heard. Word on the street.”

“Can we still want to fall in love and have a family and have that be a priority? I just feel like men were workaholics, right? And women taught them that, look, there’s something to be gotten out of being nurturing, of showing up for your kids—emotionally—something in it for you personally.”

“There was that old saying like ‘No one on his deathbed says “I should’ve spent more time at the office.”’ ”

“Actually, that’s pretty much what Da Vinci said on his deathbed. ‘I have offended God and mankind because my work did not reach the quality it should have.’ ”

“Wow,” Dot says, “because I really thought he gave it his all.”

“Me, too!”

“If I got to pick what the next wave of feminists might do, it would be this.” Dot puts both elbows on the table and leans in. “Let’s not be all women cutting down other women. Let’s let each other breathe a little, you know? If we stop judging each other and instead set our sights on some real shit, we could get stuff done. You know?”

“So I can make love a priority—one of those big sweeping wholehearted lifelong loves—and you’d support me? The Aristotle kind of love, ‘a single soul inhabiting two bodies.’ ”

“Don’t make me quote Pat Benatar. It’s all I’ve got.”

“I know, I know. Love is a battlefield.”

“Okay, you can be a feminist with love and family as a priority,” Dot says. “There, I said it. If you need to take it to the pope of feminism, she’ll say the same thing.”